Modeling practices that annoy you

I know that everyone has to work with someone else's models at some point, and since everyone has different paths to reach any given end point, there's going to be some paths that just annoy the crap out of you when you have to use that person's models.

Here's the one that pisses me off to no end:

I deal with a lot of injection molded parts. The guy that designed most of our injection molded stuff worked in what I would consider a backwards way of doing things. Instead of designing the part and then making a mold from that part, he designed the mold first, and then mated the pieces of the mold together around just a plain extrusion, and then derived the assembled mold out of the extrusion to leave the part behind.

This makes it stupidly difficult to do even minor edits on the part. Any time you want to change something you have to change the mold, figuring out all the shrink factors in advance, and figure out how that's going to affect the dimensions of what your final part will look like.

To make it even more fun, any time you change the material used, even if it's just something like going from green HDPE to black or tan, it's a struggle because any feature that you change, it recalculates everything and tries to re-apply the material styles from other parts back over everything else. I spent more than two hours today trying to change a single plastic part from green to black, because nothing would stick. I couldn't even just select the solid, and edit the properties back to "As Part" with the strip overrides box checked - there's so many faces and sub-assemblies derived from / to each other in the molds that even with a Xeon E3-1280 I crashed Inventor out about 6 times.

GOD I wish I could reach out with The Force and do unto that guy what Vader did to those that displeased him ...

So, what do you find when you use other people's models?

Well nothin' yet since I am still trying to figure 3D out, but I hadda let you know, your communication skills are awe inspiring. 'Specially the Vader part.

You might have them go through the Vacuum tutorial in my signature.

Have them go through the built-in Inventor Tooling tutorials as well.

He doesn't work here anymore. If he did, though, he'd be my boss, and it's generally considered bad form to rub in to your boss that he doesn't really know how to do his job.